Cloud Security

Ever get confused looks from colleagues when you talk about cloud computing? You’re not alone. VersionOne Inc. , a project management software supplier, asked 110 senior finance professionals what the term “cloud computing” meant, and 67 percent answered, “Don’t know.”

So consider this the introductory slide for your next presentation on cloud computing strategy. InformationWeek has examined the market in five categories: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, storage as a service, and hybrid clouds, which combine the first four categories with on-site data centers.

Software as a Service: Sales-force automation was one of the first areas where delivering enterprise software online gained traction, led by Salesforce.com, which now has more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It replaces up-front licensing costs with monthly subscriptions, plus it often means easier deployment, maintenance, and upgrades, since employees just log on to a Website to get access to applications. SaaS has spread to most application categories, and it’s the business model of choice for software startups.

Infrastructure as a Service: This involves buying online server capacity as needed from vendors such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Savvis, and Verizon. Customers pay for computing power based on consumption, much like electricity. The virtualized servers are typically offered in varying configurations, letting users choose processor, memory, operating system, and more.

Storage as a Service: This has the same pay-for-use business model as infrastructure. With data volumes soaring, storage-as-a-service vendors such as Carbonite, EMC, IBM, Seagate, and Symantec say they can lower costs by taking on storage management and insulate customers from the capital costs associated with hardware upgrades.

Platform as a Service: Developers looking for a convenient way to build and deploy Web applications are increasingly using PaaS to do it. Available from Google, Microsoft, and others, these cloud services come with a development environment, and they make testing and deployment easier and more reliable. Vendors sometimes bundle infrastructure services with PaaS or link to infrastructure providers.

Hybrid Clouds: The hybrid cloud model tries to mesh the conventional on-premises data center model with the variable capacity that these cloud models offer. A company might buy on-demand computing capacity to handle Web traffic spikes from a major promotion or for a demanding research effort. Rather than buy hardware that runs far below capacity most of the time, the hybrid approach promises to let companies run their own servers at higher utilization, buying overflow capacity on demand.

So far, it’s more concept than reality. Companies are building cloud infrastructures inside their own data centers, using virtualization and load balancing to gain higher utilization. But virtualization vendors make it hard to seamlessly switch those loads to outsiders. Vendors like VMware and Citrix, as well as systems management vendors, are promising to tackle that problem and make hybrid a more practical option.

— Paul Korzeniowski

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